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By Root 1256 0

might adapt itself to new realities, the death of slavery remained difficult to accept. The slave-owning class had always included in its ranks men and women of varying degrees of temperament and mental stability, with the vast majority falling somewhere between the legendary gentlemen and sadists. Understandably, wartime tensions, privations, and personal tragedies had taken their toll and left many white families shattered, bitter, angry, and betrayed. Now, in addition to the other calamities which had been visited upon them, they faced the loss of their slave property and perhaps their labor force. That proved to be more grief than some masters and mistresses were capable of handling. After acknowledging their freedom, “Big Jim” McClain, a Virginia planter, asked his more than one hundred slaves to continue to work for him. None of them expressed a willingness to remain, not even to harvest the current crops. At this affront, the pent-up bitterness in McClain suddenly exploded. Seizing his pistol, he fired wildly into a crowd of terrorized blacks, killing some outright and wounding others. When finally restrained, McClain tried to take his own life. At this point, several blacks promised to stay for another year and that seemed to placate him. But Union troops would have to intervene before he would permit any of his former slaves to leave the plantation.56

Although few of their masters reacted as violently, newly freed slaves had little way of knowing what to expect. The violent outburst of a McClain, based on his record as a slaveholder, probably surprised none of his blacks. But Matt Gaud, on the other hand, had treated his three slave families like they were members of his own family. At least, that was how Anderson Edwards remembered him. “The other niggers called us Major Gaud’s free niggers.” Gaud had no sooner heard of emancipation, however, than he began to curse his blacks vigorously, proclaiming that the Almighty had never intended such a thing as “free niggers.” And, as Edwards recalled, his master “cussed till he died.” Having endured a hard bondage, which included being sold six times, Jane Simpson expected no help from her last owners—a temperamental mistress and alcoholic master. Anticipating no change in their attitudes, she learned soon after emancipation how accurately she had assessed their character. Like most of the slaveholding families in the neighborhood, she recalled, “dey was so mad ’cause dey had to set ’em free, dey just stayed mean as dey would ’low ’em to be anyhow, and is yet most of ’em.” Not surprisingly, the plantation mistresses, many of whom suddenly faced the unpleasant prospect of doing the cooking and housework themselves, often reacted with even greater resentment than their husbands, belying what may have been left of their reputation as the benevolent half of the household. Although the master “took it well,” a former South Carolina slave recalled, the mistress (who had lost two sons in the war) “just cussed us and said, ‘Damn you, you are free now.’ ” At the same time, the mistress of a Georgia plantation, where some two hundred slaves had resided, gave every indication of losing her mind after her husband acknowledged the emancipation decree. “I ’members how she couldn’t stay in the house,” Emma Hurley remarked, “she jest walked up an’ down out in the yard a-carrin’-on, talkin’ an’ a-ravin’.”57

To believe the testimony of former slaves, some of their masters and mistresses never did recover from emancipation but died shortly afterwards from “heartbreak” and grief. “Miss Polly died right after the surrender,” a former Virginia slave recalled. “She was so hurt that all the negroes was going to be free. She died hollering ‘Yankee!’ She was so mad that she just died.” Similarly, Isaac Martin, who had been a slave in Texas, remembered that his master “didn’ live long atter dey tek his slaves ’way from him. Well, it jis’ kill him, dat’s all.” In these instances, as in many others, it remains unclear whether the “heartbreak” was induced by the loss of slaves with whom the white